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August 27, 2006

G129: Mariners 4, Red Sox 3

David Wells pitched pretty well (7-8-2-1-4, 97), but couldn't hold leads of 1-0 and 2-1. (He wasn't helped by some atrocious outfield defense from Coco Crisp's noodle arm in center and Gabe Kapler's meandering routes to hits in the gap in right.)

Mike Timlin entered the game in the eighth and promptly coughed up a 3-2 lead -- surrendering a solo home run, two singles and a sac fly.

Boston stays 5.5 GB New York and falls to 5.5 GB of the Twins for the wild card.

***

Since their sweep of the Red Sox, the Yankees have lost four of five games. They lost their third in a row this afternoon, 12-7, to the Angels. (The Angels have racked up 32 hits in two games.) ... Let's see if the Sox can take advantage of the loss tonight.

Today's Pet Peeve: Pregame notes inform us that Wells has appeared in 42 games against the Mariners, pitching 194.1 innings. He is 11-11 with a 4.54 ERA.

This information is worthless. Telling us this is a waste of time.

Wells was 24 years old when he first faced Seattle -- on September 4, 1987, his 4th major league appearance. Pitching for Toronto, he faced Alvin Davis, Domingo Ramos, Jim Presley and Scott Bradley -- all four of whom were out of baseball by 1993. How is his performance in that game relevant to how he might do tonight? Have the announcers and writers who blather about stuff like this thought it through at all?

On August 31, 1993, Wells (with Detroit) threw five shutout innings against the Mariners. That bodes well for tonight, right? But on July 25, 1997, Wells (now with the Yankees) allowed 9 hits and 8 runs in 3.1 innings to Seattle. That's clearly bad. ... I'm so confused.

15 comments:

Great point, Redsock. Considering there were 4 expansion teams added in the 90's, a plethora of new stadiums and the whole juice/no juice issue, the smart stathead will give us the last 3 years performance splits.

I'd do away with the stat completely. A lot of the time, the same players aren't playing, maybe the pitcher was coming off an injury, maybe the opposing lineup was weak for whatever reason. Dozens of factors.

I guess it depends on what you expect the stats to tell you. If you think they have predictive value, then you're on fairly shaky ground anyway. If you like background info, then it's about as interesting as what high school somebody went to. But if you like announcers to either inform us about stuff we can't see or stfu ...

How could that game not have been played under protest?!? Fracoma never seems to give a shit about the terrible calls... He never looks more than vaguely confused while trotting out to listen to the ump, then trotting back...

Mike Timlin should not come in during close games anymore. He's given up over a run per inning in his last twenty appearances. He's lost it, and we need to stop hoping that he'll regain it. We've lost a ton of games when we've had the lead because Timlin gave up some runs. It's time to give him the Seanez treatment. Let MDC be our set-up guy. Let Papelbon pitch two innings. Hell, Tavarez has been pitching well, I think I'm more comfortable him than Timlin

This game exemplifies why I have no hope at this point. The team simply can't get the game to Papelbon, and Tito would rather lose than use JP like Rollie Fingers, which he obviously could do.The Sox started this season with 4 40-year old pitchers, and the odds caught up with them: one pitched up to expectations, one was injured most of the year, one went down for a substantial period, and the last, Timlin, finally hit the wall. That's not an unusual result; what would have been an unusual result would have been for them to all be healthy and effective. I thought the young arms would be insurance against the risk, but here's Timlin in August, pitching batting practice in the 8th .

What IS the matter with Crisp's arm? The Seattle guys were speculating that he's hurt...sure looks like it to me. Those are Little League throws.